The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [150]
Science as the Ultimate Bias-Detection Machine
The study of cognitive biases has revealed that humans are anything but the Enlightenment ideal of rational calculators carefully weighing the evidence for and against beliefs. And these biases are far reaching in their effects. A judge or jury assessing evidence against a defendant, a CEO evaluating information about a company, or a scientist weighing data in favor of a theory will undergo the same cognitive temptations to confirm what is already believed.
What can we do about it? In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. In experiments, strict double-blind controls are required, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other labs unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirming evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Nevertheless, scientists are no less vulnerable to these biases, so such precautions must be vigorously enforced, especially by the scientists themselves, because if you don’t seek contradictory data against your theory or beliefs, someone else will, usually with great glee and in a public forum.
How this method of science developed historically and how it works today are the subject of the final chapters and epilogue of this book.
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Geographies of Belief
Throughout this journey into the believing brain we have seen how we are not the rational calculators and logic machines that the Enlightenment philosophers who launched the Age of Reason envisioned. We are, in fact, subject to a host of factors that shape our beliefs. Patternicity ensures that we will seek and find patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. Agenticity drives us to infuse those patterns with meaning and intentional agents to explain why things happen as they do. These meaningful patterns form the core of our beliefs, for which our brains employ a host of cognitive biases that continually confirm our beliefs as true, and our understanding of reality is dependent upon those beliefs. To reiterate my thesis: beliefs come first, the explanations for the beliefs follow.
How, then, can we tell the difference between true and false patterns? How can we discern the difference between real and imaginary agents? How can we avoid the cognitive bias pitfalls that so burden our rationality? The answer is science. A brief tour through what I am calling the geographies of belief reveals that despite the subjectivity of our psychologies, relatively objective knowledge is available through the tools of science. The story of how those tools were created is a halting journey of exploration of the world and our place in it.
Figure 13. Terra Australis Incognita
Terra incognita are two of the most important words ever penned on the geography of belief, embodying the mental space of unlimited exploration—a story without end. They appear on this map, Terra Australis Incognita, by Hendrik Hondius, 1657. COURTESY OF DIXON LIBRARY, STATE LIBRARY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA.
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Terra Incognita
The belief engine drives all forms of perception in all fields of knowledge, and there are few more dramatic examples than those from the history of exploration. Geographical maps shape cognitive maps, and vice versa. When Claudius Ptolemaeus of Alexandria—better known to history as Ptolemy—penned the words Terra Australis Incognita at the bottom of his second-century CE world map, he unwittingly also provided a cognitive map that shaped exploration for more than 1,500 years by freeing humanity from the constraints of a dogged and dogmatic commitment to certainty. The